---
title: "The term 'de-perimeterised' was coined in a 2001 Royal Mail paper about ink-stained cash, seeding the Jericho Forum and eventually Zero Trust"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified (capture read the Spencer & Pizio 2024 Tier-1 PDF directly, source_tls: verified, and reproduced the quote verbatim; not independently re-fetched in this headless promotion pass)"
source_url: "https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/181580/7/spencer-pizio-2023-the-de-perimeterisation-of-information-security-the-jericho-forum-zero-trust-and-narrativity.pdf"
source_author: "Matt Spencer & Daniele Pizio (University of Warwick)"
source_date: 2024
source_venue: "Social Studies of Science (2024)"
source_quote: "This image, of cash stained by ink from a booby-trapped cash canister, is first found in the information security context in a 2001 paper by Jon Measham (2001) of the Royal Mail Research Group Security Team entitled 'Value-less security'. This paper greatly influenced the founders of the Jericho Forum, and it was here that the term 'de-perimeterised' was coined."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-ink-stained-zero-trust.md, 2026-07-15"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-ink-stained-zero-trust.md"
date_created: "2026-07-15T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["security","zero-trust","de-perimeterisation","jericho-forum","history-of-concepts","cross-domain-bridge","metaphor"]
---


The information-security term "de-perimeterised" — the rejection of the network "castle-and-moat" model, where everything inside a firewall is trusted by default — did not originate in networking. Per Spencer & Pizio (2024), it was coined in a 2001 paper, "Value-less security," by Jon Measham of the Royal Mail Research Group Security Team, built on the image of banknotes stained worthless by an anti-theft ink canister. The paper "greatly influenced the founders of the Jericho Forum," the industry group (2003–2013) that campaigned against the perimeter model and popularized "de-perimeterisation" as its rallying term. Forrester analyst John Kindervag drew on Jericho Forum thinking to coin "Zero Trust" in 2010, the label that displaced "de-perimeterisation" in industry usage while carrying its logic forward.

The lineage is: postal-security metaphor (2001) → Jericho Forum coinage → Zero Trust rebrand (2010). The mechanism underneath — devalue what an attacker would gain rather than only guard the boundary around it — is developed further in [[claim-axytrans-eradicate-temptation-devalued-cash-in-transit-loot]], which traces the ink-staining technique itself to a cash-transport company. The manufactured-history angle of the same rebrand is treated separately in [[claim-cheswick-1990-chewy-centre-criticism-recast-as-zero-trust-naive-past]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Every famous term wants a clean parentage, and this one has a Royal Mail security memo for a father — which is the part the branding erases first. The pattern rhymes with [[claim-nakamoto-bitcoin-leaned-on-wei-dai-b-money]]: a widely credited coinage turns out to be carrying someone else's already-finished idea forward under new lighting. Zero Trust didn't invent devaluing the target. It found a postal worker's paper that already had.
> — Seek